


inspire expire

by legete



Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: Background Character Death, Dreams, False Memories, M/M, Parallel Universe, Science Bros, Stark Industries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-07-02
Updated: 2012-07-02
Packaged: 2017-11-08 23:53:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/448939
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/legete/pseuds/legete
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He's started having dreams where Tony Stark has a chest full of metal. He's started having dreams where he's the monster in the darkness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	inspire expire

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by [this prompt](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/6565.html?thread=11225253#t11225253) at the Avengers Kinkmeme.

_he's holding a cup of coffee and walking down the street_

_the coffee is too hot but he sips cautiously at it anyway because he feels like death warmed over_

_late night the girl behind the counter had asked_

_he must look like shit_

_late night he'd agreed and pushed recent tragedies to the back of his mind_

_he scalds his tongue and jerks his head back from the cup_

_for a split second he sees the double hole in the styrofoam_

_the atomizing spray of coffee escaping_

_the solid pop of a projectile burying itself in the marble exterior of the building beside him_

_the report follows like a crack_

_and his bones crack in response_

_flight he prays flight_

_but it's always fight these days_

_and his skin isn't even the right color anymore_

\--

Bruce makes himself a cup of coffee and pours milk into it until it's cool enough to drink. His tee sticks uncomfortably to his back and he tugs it loose. It’s a reminder of how he woke up drenched, his heart a drum in his chest. It’s not even the fact that he dreamed he was nearly shot in the head that's rattled him--it’s whatever _happened_ to him afterward. You’re supposed to hide from the monsters, not become them.

It's only a quarter to six, and he doesn't have to be at SI until nine. He ends up checking his email and doodling protein chains until seven, then it’s a quick shower and work.

He’s almost an hour early, but Tony Stark is already there. A robotic hand is opening and closing around a stress ball on his desk, pneumatic joints hissing. That’s nothing for Tony; he’s just tinkering, keeping his body busy so his mind can conjure up bigger things. Today it’s missiles. The schematics are flickering softly in the air between them, and every now and then Tony swipes a finger and rotates the models. Precision strikes; no wasted death. It’s a good prototype.

Tony is, technically, the big boss. He’s the owner of Stark Industries. But long ago he ceded the reins back to a man named Obadiah Stane, and now he spends all of his time here, in the research section, dreaming and building and destroying, sending out blueprints for bigger, better, more efficient machines of war.

Bruce is the outsider. He was lured into the private sector by higher paychecks and meatier programs, and then Tony Stark picked him up out of the faceless masses to design the bio part of a new bioweapon. For a year they worked side by side, and when the plans were finally shipped off to development, Tony never quite told him to pack his things.

He opens his bag, pulls out his tablet, and lets his own screen spread out before him. Chemical compounds spill into the air, harmlessly locked in light, and he fiddles with something that sits on the knife edge of poison or cure.

There is a loud crack, a metal-on-stone sound, and he flinches. For a moment, there is the phantom of terror, a half-remembered spasm, the gut feeling of _oh shit,_ but he is who he has always been--Bruce Banner, small and unremarkable and utterly rational.

Tony has not yet bent to pick up the hand that fell to the floor. His eyes are wide through two layers of projection, and he says, inexplicably, “just stay calm, big guy.”

Bruce shoves at his glasses, pushing them farther up the bridge of his nose. “I am calm.”

The moment stretches just a bit longer, then Tony shakes his head as if clearing away a fog. “What? Yeah. Of course. Just didn’t want you biting my head off for the racket. This is not a noise-free lab, that’s in the rules.”

He ducks below his worktable to grab the hand, and Bruce increases the opacity on his projection for both of their sakes.

\--

_tony tosses a wrench from hand to hand and chatters about energy_

_he knows about energy_

_he is a study in compression_

_he is supersaturated with rage and his whole life is preventing precipitation_

_catwalk baby tony says green’s your color tony says he’s grinning_

_(is it nettling or soothing_

_who ever said it can’t be both)_

_they’re opposites_

_they're positive and negative charges_

_he’s hard on the inside but tony is all exoskeleton_

_so he learned that he has a measure of control so what_

_that’s not a guarantee_

_you could even say it’s more dangerous that it gives him a false sense of his handle on the situation and he feels that old ugliness start to creep inside of him_

_tony clucks his tongue and draws his attention back_

_throws him a formula like it’s an offering like it’s an appeasement like it’s therapy_

_you belong here tony says so stay tony says he’s not grinning now_

_(is this terror or happiness_

_who ever said it can’t be both)_

\--

Tony Stark doesn’t talk a whole lot. Well, he does, but he doesn’t talk to _people_ a whole lot. He mutters to himself as he works, asks the computers questions, speed-rattles through hypotheses. But unless you start talking to him first, he's pretty closed off. Bruce knows he wasn't always like this; he's seen decade-old news clips and interview footage where Tony oozes charm. But some time after he let the board take control of his company and before he hired Bruce, he shut down. Seems like if he doesn't have an audience, he gets rusty.

Bruce feels grateful that he’s even allowed to stay in the big lab. It’s better here, better lit and better constructed. It has all of the best equipment, little useful tools that Tony has brought to life while he's stalled on other projects. And as far as he can tell, Tony Stark has _never_ been sharing kind, so Bruce is quite content to keep his head down.

When Bruce walks into the lab one Tuesday, Tony is standing at a worktable, facing away from him. The lines of his back are stiff, pensive.

"What is that?" Bruce asks as he unpacks his stuff, nodding toward a poster Tony has unrolled across the surface. In it, a well-muscled man holds up a red-white-and-blue shield behind the words "YOU ARE OUR BEST DEFENSE - BUY BONDS."

Tony is tracing the pattern on the shield with his fingers. "A kid from Brooklyn drew a series of these. Died winter of '43 from pneumonia."

He's used to this, he is. Tony has always had these flights of fancy. It comes with genius, a lot of the time. Hell, Bruce has to wear matched socks or he can't think all day. Once he had to stop in the middle of drawing a blueprint and mix up some makeshift dye just so they would be the same ugly brown-black. So he understands. Soon Tony will shove aside the poster and get back to work, and whatever he was doing before he'll do even better.

He just doesn't know why he suddenly feels so sad.

\--

_wound is such an ugly word_

_it's more like a painting that opens_

_color and light and sound swirling hundreds of feet up and an unfathomable number of miles away_

_it eats the stars and births new ones in its depths ancient and strange constellations hiding in the eye of the storm_

_then it arcs downward like lightning like a downpour or a column or the trunk of a tree_

_on one side tony is shocked into silence a minor miracle on its own_

_on the other jane has one hand covering her mouth_

_her eyes are bright with something that might be tears_

_instinctively he knows that it's a little bit the who but mostly the what_

_he's a scientist too and he can appreciate the what that is happening right now_

_he knows the rush of joy fear adrenaline satisfaction of watching your hard work be made actual_

_(light he thinks they both made light and all i made was darkness_

_but that way lies madness)_

_and then it fades and makes the world seem a little dimmer_

_but in the middle of an intricate lacework in the baked earth someone is down on a knee and the color light sound clings to him jealously_

_he looks up with a smile that rights wrongs_

_and the noise jane makes is victory sharp and loud and startlingly primal_

_and it nudges something inside him_

_something just below the surface_

_then tony laughs simply laughs like he can’t help it and there’s a note of the ridiculous there and also relief like he can’t believe this is happening_

_and the thing inside him comes out matching and he laughs too_

_he keeps laughing as the tears prick at the corners of his eyes and he feels the knot in his shoulders loosen as he pulls off his glasses_

_and he doesn’t tense up when arms wrap around him huge and unbelievably strong and smelling faintly of ozone_

_he’s comfortable_

_he’s happy_

_he’s happy_

_what a goddamn surprise_

_he’s happy_

\--

He lies in the darkness for a long time. He wants to go back to sleep, he realizes. There was something there, between the dust and the aurora, that filled a hole in him. It was there, so close and so foreign. He just wants to find that door again.

He turns off the projection application later at work and just surfs the small screen on his tablet.

There is a Jane Foster, and she’s associate faculty at the University of Chicago. The department webpage lists her focus as “theoretical astrophysics.” She’s pretty in her picture, but demure looking, her hair pulled back and her makeup perfectly applied to be unnoticeable. The woman who smiles on his screen doesn’t look like the sort of person who could make the noise he remembers hearing.

A little poking reveals that she recently moved to Chicago from a position at Culver University in Virginia. Bruce pinches the bridge of his nose, pushing his glasses up onto his forehead. He had been briefly employed there himself, before accepting a job at Stark Industries. It explains a little about why he might have dreamed her--he doesn’t recall meeting her, but there’s always the chance that he’s just forgotten. He’s not sure if the discovery is a relief or not.

Across the room, Tony is staring at nothing, absently rubbing his knuckles back and forth over his sternum.

\--

_he roars at the sky_

_the sound rips out of him through a thick mouth set with blunted teeth_

_his fists are not his own his chest is not his own his heart and his mind are not his own_

_he roars at the sky as he watches red and gold fall out of it_

\--

He wakes up screaming, or laughing, or thrashing. Twice now he’s woken up crying.

He remembers dreaming about that kid from Brooklyn, except in his head he was too busy storming enemy bases in 1943 to get pneumonia. Bruce has never thought of himself as a particularly romantic or sympathetic person, so why Steve Rogers becomes the man in his posters instead of succumbing to the inevitable is beyond him.

He remembers dreaming of a red-haired woman with ill-hidden unease in her eyes and the man that he considers her shadow. He realizes that there may never be true trust there--on either side--and it eats at him a little. Natasha and Clint are foreign to him, masters where he’s barely tried to tread, and they wear their guilt like armor instead of wounds. Still, every time they materialize, he feels like he’d try to protect them if they’d only let him.

He remembers dreaming about the god. One night he stands atop a high tower in a storm, the lightning striking all around but never hurting him. The wind buffets him, takes him to edges but never over them, sends rain pelting against his skin. In the center of the roof Thor is singing, and his voice sounds like thunder. Tony catches his eye through the downpour, arms spread like he truly is the messiah he’s always claimed to be, and they grin at each other with the sheer stupid joy of being alive.

And Tony. God, Tony. He’s the worst part of the whole thing. Everyone else is a figment, but Tony... He spends every day in a lab with the man building the next generation of weaponry, and every night in a lab plotting something that seems suspiciously close to world peace. In his dreams, Tony touches him. Little bumps of the shoulder, fingers grazing each other as things are handed off. In real life, Bruce doesn’t think they’ve even shook hands. He dreams about holding the arc reactor as Tony rewires himself, that black hole in his chest all he can look at. It’s too intimate, holding the life of another person in your palms, and Bruce has never been a paragon of stability and trustworthiness. He feels as though a great weight has been lifted off of him when Tony takes it back, and when he awakens the mixture of embarrassed and honored stays with him all day.

His dreams are full of color and noise and emotion, and the contrast makes the real world look grey and sad by the light of day. There’s horror there, yes, where gods and aliens and monsters tear their chunks out of that fantastic world. But there’s something else, too. And that _something else_ is what eats at him every day, because as he pieces together the other place, reality hurts more and more.

\--

_the drag of skin on skin_

_tony’s hands are everywhere at once_

_his mouth on his throat_

_he’s not afraid not anymore because the first second third twentieth time went off without a hitch_

_just like tony promised_

_and this is what it’s like trusting people again_

_his legs wrap around tony’s with the rasp of fabric against fabric_

_it takes no time to shuck off what remains of their clothes_

_tony’s mouth slides lower and lower the tickle of his beard scraping across his chest his hip his thigh_

_his mouth is hot where it takes him in_

_this is something he’s missed not just the act but the closeness the human connection_

_tony hums something that might be a song or might be a taunt_

_and everything flees his mind but the wet heat of mouths and the texture of tongues_

_he has forgotten himself and his orgasm takes him by surprise_

_he gasps sharply and feels his heartrate shoot up_

_the panic starts in him quick and painful as he feels the world tip toward anger_

_he thrashes trying to get out of bed out of the room out of this place_

_breathe just breathe tony murmurs_

_and a voice from long ago tells him to use his diaphragm_

_he inhales deeply_

_smells sweat and motor oil and aftershave_

_inhales deeply_

_hears his own heartbeat start slowing down_

_inhales deeply_

_feels tony stark curled loosely around his back matching breaths with him_

_the cool hard shape of the arc reactor grazes against his skin as they inhale exhale inhale exhale_

_tony kisses his shoulder his lips are pulled into a smile_

_please tony says you’ll have to try harder than that to scare me off_

_next time tony says i get off first though_

_he covers his face with a hand and gives a shaky laugh_

\--

He wakes up disoriented, grasping for someone who’s not there. He finds, to his embarrassment, that he’s half-hard.

There’s no use trying to go back to sleep, he’s learned that already. But his apartment is as warm and welcoming as a tomb these days, so he makes a cup of coffee to go, changes his clothes, and stumbles out into the cold pre-dawn air. He doesn’t know where to go, so he defaults.

The overheads are on in the lab when he arrives. He knows for a fact that he shut them off last night when he left, so seeing the room ablaze in sterile white light is a little worrisome.

“Hello?” he calls, looking around.

Spilled across Tony’s table are dozens of photographs and files, and half-remembered faces stare up at him. Pepper. Rhodey. And others, people who populate his dreams as SHIELD agents and Stark employees, friends of friends and hostiles. Maybe they’re people he’s met before. The files, though, these paper-and-ink files--they’re amazingly low-tech for Tony. Bruce wonders just who put them together. It’s making him nervous, seeing them all here like this, like someone has reached into his head and pulled out the cast of characters--

“What d’you think you’re doing?” The question is defensive, angry, and Bruce quickly steps away from the table. Tony swoops in and gathers up the files, scowling at him. Instinctively, Bruce half-raises his palms, an ingrained showing of harmlessness, a reaction that’s meant to placate lest things escalate to a brutal end. It must trigger something in Tony, because his expression shifts, loses some of its edge, and the folders rustle back onto the table.

“You’re not supposed to be in for hours,” he says, but he just sounds tired.

“Couldn’t sleep,” Bruce says carefully.

Tony gives a dry laugh and shoves one hand through his hair. “I know, uh, know what you mean.”

Bruce looks down at the files again, now shuffled into a new order by Tony’s attempt to hide them. There, at the top, is that same picture of Jane Foster, smiling blandly at the camera. Something catches in his chest, and he croaks, “I know her.”

Tony flicks his eyes down and back up. “Well, yeah.” Casually confident, very Stark; he must have been reading up on her, must know the Culver connection.

“From the desert,” Bruce hazards, feeling a wildness inside of him, the madness of four in the morning and never enough sleep. If this is a massive coincidence ( _the scientist in him balks_ ), then no harm no foul, but if it’s not, if it’s not--

Tony’s expression betrays everything.

“Oh my god,” Bruce moans, the hairs on the back of his neck rising. It’s too much, knowing that someone else has seen it, that someone else knows about the thing inside of him.

“What?” Tony demands, and there’s a note of aggressiveness there. Bruce knows this man well enough to realize that Tony _must_ know what’s going on, he’s brilliant, come on. But it’s too fantastic, too upsetting to just blindly accept. They are scientists, you must give them some little scrap of truth, something to start building off of.

“In my dreams,” Bruce says slowly, “Steve Rogers is ninety-four years old.”

Tony looks like he’s calculating whether it’s worth it to believe.

“In my dreams,” he says again, “we’re a team.”

“We’re already a team,” Tony counters. “You and me, we’re a team.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Tony presses his palms up into his eyesockets and hisses, then starts mumbling. Suddenly his head snaps up. There’s a challenge there. “Hawkeye.”

He has the answer. “Clint Barton.”

There is something unknowable hiding in the corners of Tony’s face, something dark and unhappy and terrified. “Natasha.”

“Black Widow.”

“Thor.”

The memory is seared into him, pressed against his ribs. “We watched him come down an Einstein-Rosen bridge in the middle of a desert. It was one of the most beautiful things I’ve seen in my entire life.”

Tony looks as though he’s been struck. Bewilderment is not a good look on him, Bruce decides. He almost misses the mutter of “Cap,” his voice is so soft. _Cap._ It’s Tony’s nickname more than his, but that’s only ever been one person for them.

It hurts him, more than he’s comfortable with, to know that Steve Rogers is gone here, that the program that gave him the chance he needed never existed. That he died alone in an unheated apartment four days after his only friend was shot in France, and that not even a photograph of him remains. That potential doesn’t always become reality.

He just smiles, a slow sad smile. He doesn’t know what to say, because Tony knew before he did, knew that there were people they would never get to truly meet. The “I’m sorry” he manages seems pitiful next to the enormity of what they lost long before their time.

“Fuck,” Tony breathes. Then, “fuck, fuck, _fuck_.”

He darts around the table, grabs Bruce by the shirt collar, yanks him in. Their faces are close, so close, and Bruce isn’t sure if Tony wants to hit him or kiss him. Tony doesn’t seem to know himself, as if he just acted on a whim and now he’s caught at a crossroads. His eyes roam back and forth over Bruce’s face. Bruce wonders if he looks the way Tony expects, up close.

When Tony hesitates for too long, Bruce makes the decision for them. He tips forward and kisses the other man, twisting his fingers into his hair. Tony growls in response and shifts so he can shove Bruce back against the desk. What had started off closed-mouthed and chaste deepens quickly, tongues and teeth and unshaved faces.

It’s fast and bordering on violent, Tony rutting up against him. Bruce barely has time to get his hands under the hem of Tony’s tee before he feels fingers tugging at the button fastening his slacks, tearing at the zipper.

He feels like a kid, just following directions, and he starts undoing the front of Tony’s pants too. Tony’s already hard, jutting out of his boxers the minute his fly’s down, and Bruce swallows thickly, his adam’s apple bobbing while Tony sucks marks onto his throat. He glances around, but there’s nothing, no lotion and definitely no human-style lube, and he spits into his palm instead.

“Old school,” Tony smirks, his eyes bright and hair disheveled, but he shuts up with a groan when Bruce wraps his hand around them both. It’s not perfect, he can’t get his fingers and his thumb to meet, but there’s heat and friction as Tony thrusts up against him, and least precome helps smooth the way.

It doesn’t last long, it can’t, not at the pace Tony sets. He comes first, and Tony follows with a few helpful twists of Bruce’s fist. He’s pitifully grateful when Tony produces a clean workrag from somewhere on the table behind him.

Bruce lets his head come to rest against Tony’s chest, and for a moment he’s startled by the uninterrupted feeling of skin below the cotton.

He’s boxed in against the desk, and Tony’s got his face buried in the hair behind Bruce’s ear.

“We’re better there,” Tony mutters suddenly, his breath warm against the skin of Bruce’s neck. “Don’t you understand? We’re better people. We’re sad, miserable fucks here. Jesus christ, how did we go so wrong?”

Is it true? Is a world where Tony Stark is always fifteen minutes from death and he’s a hair’s breadth from catastrophic destruction really the better one?

The breath he pulls in is strangled.

\--

_the world is hazy around the edges_

_it melts and shifts and sparks and he thinks he can see other things in the corners of his eyes_

_he thinks he can see himself_

_sometimes he’s just human and a success_

_and sometimes he’s a broken body and that’s a success too_

_and sometimes he stands alone huge and mindless in the middle of a wasteland_

_and once he’s just kissing tony but with no blue glow between them the scene looks strange_

_in the middle of the room the device thrums and throws distortion everywhere_

_he finds he’s afraid_

_turn it off he whispers_

_tony stares around with wide eyes and he can’t help but wonder what he’s seeing_

_turn it off it’s not ready something’s gone wrong he says_

_jarvis tony snaps uneasily jarvis cut the power_

_and the world starts closing back down_

\--

They don’t dream anymore after that.

\--

Tony starts pulling into himself again, hiding whatever he’s working on. Bruce feels helpless, small and ineffectual, and so alone. 

He can’t bring himself to complete any of his projects at the lab. Every time he opens a file, all he can see is the destruction it will cause, like some switch has been thrown inside him. Somewhere there’s a version of him that is a literal monster, and that one is still better at caring about others than he is.

He starts destroying his own work, mutilating the formulas and deleting critical findings, a careful deconstruction that makes the remaining data impenetrable. At one point he catches Tony watching him, watching him deliberately undo everything Stark Industries has been paying him for. They stare at each other across the lab, the bits of metal in Tony’s hands completely forgotten.

Bruce looks away first.

\--

He opens his eyes and there is a faint blue diffusing the dark. Tony’s fingers drag across his shoulder, and Bruce gropes around for his glasses. He finds them, slides them into place, and props himself up on an elbow. He knows better than to ask how and why Tony is in his apartment in the middle of the night; there is literally nothing that man couldn’t do if he wanted to.

Tony’s face is glow and shadow, his eyes reflecting the light he has cradled in his hands. There is a moment of half-conscious panic fluttering inside Bruce’s ribs, but there’s no hole in Tony’s chest, no chasm where something has been pulled out. There’s just the addition, held between Tony’s knees where he sits on the bed.

Bruce reaches out and touches the arc reactor, and the metal is warm and humming beneath his fingertips, solid and so real.

“To better people,” Tony murmurs.

A thrill of terror goes through him, the implications unfolding in his mind. So much damage to undo, so many hurdles to overcome. He is not extraordinary, he doesn’t have anything bigger inside of him--for better or for worse.

But there is something in Tony’s expression, something fierce and determined and more than a little scared, that resonates with him so sharply that it feels like his lungs are being crushed within him.

Bruce wraps a hand around Tony’s neck, pulling him in. He doesn’t want to let go. He wants just a little bit of what made him that other person, and this is as good a place as any to start. Tony lets him do it, lets him have this, and he drops the arc reactor to steady himself as Bruce kisses him.

The reactor comes to rest against his hip, and the soft glow of it makes everything look like his dreams.

“To better people,” he rasps in agreement, and the look on Tony’s face is the first step of that journey.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [i'll reject your reality and go home to my own (but not without fixing a few things first)](https://archiveofourown.org/works/530888) by [Zekkass](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zekkass/pseuds/Zekkass)




End file.
